Yes, it's apparently another netbook today on OSNews. Netbooks were supposed to become the major foot in the door, but as soon as Microsoft got off its fat bum and started offering Windows XP to netbook OEMs, the popularity among OEMs of Linux has dwindled; when the netbook surge started, Linux was the operating system of choice among OEMs, but now, the Windows version comes first, and the Linux version later - if at all. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin basically tells OEMs: "Yer doing it wrong".

You think anyone besides the linux geek even cares what package manager or distro is preinstalled on their new netbook. No.

The real problem is that no real person has ever heard of ubuntu, xandros, opensuse, redhat or any other linux distro. They might have heard of "linux" before. But probably by one of their geek friends.

The fragmentation / forking of linux is what prevents it from ever making it anywhere near capable of being a desktop os.

The only possible way for linux to thrive on the desktop is if the entire community unanimously decides on one major distro to be the de facto OS (the target OS).

Choice is not good. For instance there are 10 people on one side using 5 different things, or there are 1000 people on the other using one thing. Mob mentality is going to push people over to the side with 1000.